Escaping Boredom - Understanding the experiences of the ever increasing contemporary boredom among generation Y consumers
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School of Business |
Master's thesis
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Date
2016
Department
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Mcode
Degree programme
Marketing
Language
en
Pages
83
Series
Abstract
Although it has been presented that we today face more boredom than ever, the concept boredom has rarely been discussed within the social sciences or in the field of consumer research. To add to the existing literature, this study aims at understanding the role of mobile phone usage within generation Y everyday life and the interrelatedness of the increasing prevalence of boredom and the phenomenon of millenials constantly using their mobiles. The study strives to understand the construction of generation Y everyday life and the experience and implications of boredom within it and moreover, by gaining insight of the phenomenon itself, to understand the drivers behind boredom's increase within modern society. Since the aim is to understand, and not to predict, the individual experiences of generation Y consumers and explore those as they are lived, this study draws on existential-phenomenology as a research approach. The data collected from the in-depth existential-phenomenological interviews is thereafter analyzed according to interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA). As a result, 6 main findings were drawn from the in-depth existential-phenomenological interviews: (1) Mobile phone usage is part or our everyday practices, (2) boredom forms a practice of it's own, (3) mobile phones work as a means to engage in a meaning, (4) boredom operates as both cause and effect of mobile phone usage, (5) mobile phone usage reveals our suffer of existential boredom and (6) boredom works as an imperative towards meaning. Based on these findings it is suggested that social acceleration as well as other modern/post- modern sociocultural phenomena like individualism, commodification and secularization are key factors behind the increasing boredom among generation Y consumers. In addition, the entertainment industry developed to cure boredom leaves a key element of it, meaninglessness, unaddressed thus only strengthening the negative experience. Furthermore, it seems that the main driver behind the increasing mobile phone usage among generation Y is the existential boredom they suffer from and that the information overload provided by mobile technologies paradoxically results in mobile usage itself implicating boredom. It is furthermore suggested that the behavioural loops increased boredom and the developed means to escape it form are among the most significant behaviour shaping phenomena among generation Y consumers and something that today's marketers should pay significant attention to.Description
Thesis advisor
Toyoki, SammyKeywords
boredom, generation Y, consumer culture, social acceleration, postmodernism, consumer behavior